Holly Brockwell is being harassed online for saying she doesn’t want to have children. (Picture: Holly Brockwell)

When Gadgette editor Holly Brockwell wrote an essay for the BBC on her desire to get permanently sterilised, she expected some backlash.

But she wasn’t prepared for the level of vitriol that poured out online. She was flooded with tweets calling her ignorant, attention seeking, and offering to start a crowdfunding campaign for her laryngectomy, to leave her unable to speak.

Holly was commissioned by the BBC to write about a piece on women who have chosen not to have children. She explained that she simply doesn’t want to procreate, and that having her tubes tied feels like the right choice.

In an essay for the BBC, Holly wrote that she wants to go through sterilisation(Picture: Holly Brockwell)

‘I don’t need reversible contraception,’ she wrote. ‘There’s a 10-minute keyhole operation that can solve this problem for good, and I can’t believe that at the age of almost 30 in 2015, I’m still having to fight to get it.

‘We can choose to get pregnant at 16 but not to decline motherhood at 29. It seems our decisions are only taken seriously when they align with tradition.’

Within an hour of the post going live, Holly was flooded with horrific comments. She told metro.co.uk: ‘There have been a lot of really nasty comments both about my decision and about me as a person.

‘I’ve been called heartless and selfish, ignorant and stupid, naive and in need of psychiatric help – the works. Plus a whole range of disgusting words relating to the fact that I’m female.

‘I’ve been told to shut my mouth and legs, that I need an operation to stop me from speaking, and that no one will want to have sex with me anyway so I needn’t worry about pregnancy.

‘People have gone into my background, my old jobs, things I wrote years ago, anything they can find to attack me. Someone even surfaced an old article written by a men’s rights site where they said I should be sectioned because a woman not wanting kids is mentally ill.’

Holly says she received lots of support and kind messages, too, but the sheer volume of online attacks left her unable to stay on Twitter. She deactivated her account when it became too much.

Says Holly: ‘The abuse had reached a level that I could no longer cope with.

‘Normally this stuff just washes over me but the level of hatred combined with the other things going on in my life made it too much, so despite being a huge fan of Twitter, I had to switch my account off to try and escape it.

‘But messages still came through to my email and Facebook accounts.

I'm not really sure what to do about all the messages. There are over 50 unread in my Facebook inbox alone!

‘People who attack you online assume they know everything about you from what you share publicly, but of course no one knows the full story. They don’t know me at all.’

But Holly decided that she wouldn’t let trolls push her offline. Instead, she returned to Twitter to take a stand and keep speaking up for all the women who have to put up with nastiness on the internet.

This is a big complaint of trolls. "She showed all her followers what I said!" – yep. People need to see evidence that it happens

She told us: ‘I came back to Twitter because my mum was absolutely outraged that I’d let them silence me. She said I’m worth 100 of them and they’d feel victorious for having driven me away. She was right – when I reactivated I saw gloating comments.

‘Also, why should it be me who has to change my behaviour? I’m not in the wrong here.

‘I’m not the sad human being who sent horrendous abuse to a total stranger based on a lifestyle choice.

‘All I did was speak openly and truthfully about something that’s important to me. I won’t be made to feel as if that’s wrong.’

‘A woman with an opinion talking publicly about absolutely anything will get backlash.’ (Picture: Holly Brockwell)

It’s always difficult to understand why there are so many horrible people on the internet, seeming to wait for the moment a woman posts anything remotely controversial to jump out and attack. But Holly understands that for now, this is just a part of being a woman online.

She told us: ‘A woman with an opinion talking publicly about absolutely anything will get backlash. A sad contingent of throwbacks can’t accept that we have power now, that we can make decisions about our bodies and lives.

‘They want to keep us at home with the babies, dependent on them. I noticed a lot of spiteful comments about my career as a tech journalist – there are plenty of men from the old guard who don’t like seeing women in tech media.

‘The fact that I started a tech site for women earlier this year didn’t go down well with them, and this was another opportunity to tear me down.

A lot of the criticism came from parents, too, who felt Holly was attacking their choices – which she wasn’t, of course.

‘For the record, I love kids and have enormous respect for parents. I have an idea of how much work and sacrifice is involved – which is why I know I wouldn’t be the right person to have kids myself. I’d be no good at it. That’s no insult to anyone else, though.’

Holly’s story is just yet another reminder that the internet can be a really sh*t place for women. And that sites such as Twitter really need to do more to protect their users.

‘Why should it be who has to change my behaviour?(Picture: Holly Brockwell)

‘Personally, I think it would be very useful to have a function whereby if an account has been reported several times for harassment of women, it gets added to a list, and people who want to can block all of those accounts en masse.

‘When you report someone for harassment, Twitter very rarely does anything. A message pops up asking if you’ve considered blocking them, but to get around the block, all they have to do is log out or make a new account. It’s not a great solution.’